The Champion – SWOT Analysis
I totally almost forgot to write a blog post today!!! WHAT?
How did that happen?
ESPECIALLY today! Today of all days….
It’s the first day of the “writing every day” module for Praxis, and I almost forgot! Oops.
Plus, today I am analyzing the winning bakery of my competitive set analysis! How could I forget the winner? I don’t know. I guess the day just kind of flew by for me. But I’m here now and that’s the important thing. Right? Of course.
As always, if you haven’t read any of the other SWOT posts, you can find them all here:
Okay, here is the analysis for Bakery D, the bakery that ranked number one in my analysis!
Honestly, I can see why Bakery D won just by looking at those graphs! The wedges in the pie chart are all almost equal! Bakery D definitely has the most balanced pie chart of the five.
Looking at the bar graph, it is again obvious why Bakery D ranked in first place. The majority of their subcategory scores were 5’s with a few 4’s and 3’s. VERY solid performance. That’s where you want to be. However, there ARE some 1’s as well, which goes to show that even the best can improve.
Here, again, is the chart comparing all five bakeries for your convenience:
Strengths:
Bakery D is quite well rounded, but the area where they shine the brightest is in the category of Customer Experience. It only took me 1 click to find information about wedding cakes on their website, and they show up in a Google search if you type in “wedding cakes.” Additionally, their emails to me were always prompt and friendly, as was the in-store service! The smells in their store made you want to buy a wedding cake right then and there, and the displays were gorgeous as well! Quality is close behind Customer Experience, and it’s well deserved too! The samples I tasted in their store were not all that great, but I bought cupcakes from most of the other stores, so it seemed unfair to judge Bakery D’s cake taste on a free sample. SO, I went based off of my past experience with them. Their cake and their frosting are DELICIOUS, and beautiful too!
Weaknesses:
The biggest area of weakness for Bakery D is in the category of Pricing and Design Options. Although they had many different flavors available, tons of different options for if you wanted doughnuts, cupcakes, or cake, and even gluten free options, they could not give me pricing estimates. At all. That was the most frustrating thing! How hard is it to give me either a rough estimate or an average cost?! They couldn’t give me the pricing of their delivery options until I told them how far away my wedding is – information I did not have, so I didn’t give it to them. Can’t you just tell me how far you’d be willing to go and how much you would charge for that distance? And for the pricing of the actual cake, they couldn’t even give me a cost per slice estimate because I didn’t provide them with the number of guests I am having at my wedding (which, again, isn’t happening yet)! It seems to me that this should be an easy fix, however. Plus, when you call about YOUR wedding, it’ll actually be happening and you can give them the information they need to get you a proper price estimate. 😛
Opportunities:
Bakery D already does so many things very well, that it’s hard for me to even pinpoint one area of opportunity. HOWEVER – since they do pretty much everything wonderfully, I think opening up another location should be seriously considered. Right now, Bakery D only has one location, and it’s tucked away on the side of a building strip-mall area. I think they are good enough to consider adding another location on the other side of the city as they would benefit from having two stores, and they could pull it off because they’re already running their current store very successfully! Sure, there would be a lot of stress and money spent during the transition, but to get better, sometimes you have to go through times where not everything is going perfectly.
Threats:
After thinking about this for a while, I have decided that Bakery D’s biggest threat is their lack of publicity. As mentioned above, their store isn’t really out in the open where people can see it very well, which may lead to less costumers. If their store were in a busier area with more natural traffic going by, more people would see it and maybe go in and buy a cake. Their website IS very present online though, so at least they have that part covered well!
Conclusions:
I am reminded again why Bakery D is the clear winner of this competitive set analysis! Almost everything they do is laid out perfectly for selling wedding cakes, and other occasion cakes as well! There are a few loose ends that could be cleaned up, but other than that, Bakery D has a solid win!
Until next time,
Hope Frances
SWOT Analyses - Continued
